GANEIDA'S KNOT.

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Tuesday, November 2, 2010

"Never ride faster than your guardian angel can fly."Anon.

My dad used to own one of these ~ an old Indian. I believe he came to grief on it a time or two. Given the trouble he had with cars I'm surprised he lived to tell the tale but he did. He grew up ~ well, he got older~ & exchanged his bike for a family car & the wife & kids to go with it. The bike got stored in his sister's shed.

Now Dad's sister, my Auntie Shirley, was an unusual woman. She loved her brother with a passion but she had some odd quirks & that bike had been sitting in her shed 20 odd years. Possibly longer. By anyone's standards it had reached antique status. In Shirl's eyes it was just another piece of junk, junk that didn't even work any more.

Shirley also lived in white ant country; termites; in a house over a hundred years old. These little blighters will eat their way through just about anything & eventually they ate their way through Shirl's front verandah steps. Being a do it herself sort of a woman Shirl set about rectifying this problem & bought herself a bag of cement & some sand. You know where this is going don't you?

Yep. Finding herself sort of *fill* for her new set of steps Shirl began clearing out her shed. Somewhere in the shire there is a hundred year old house with a fine set of curved cement steps with an old Indian bike firmly embedded therein!

My SIL has this to say about the enterprise: At least it was just the bike's frame that went into the cement...We sold the engine a few years ago to a fellow on the coast who had an immaculately restored Indian. I think he had a second bike that was going through the same process. We even had a tank and a headlight to go with the engine. Evidently they weren't good enough to be reinforcing in concrete! lol Interestingly, it was actually a military version of the Indian that your dad had. I did a search on the engine number and got all sorts of interesting information up about it. I'll just bet she did ~ & it would make sense to her. She's the bike lady!

Not a bike sorta person (bet that surprises you;-}) but that is the most beautiful motorbike I have ever seen. It's almost a work of art! I cannot imagine how much one of these would cost these days, eh?